ROB LOWE’S BIG ROLE: ADVOCATE
Former ‘Brat Pack’-er turned acting vet honors family as cancer spokesman
THE ACTOR USES HIS CELEBRITY STATUS AS A SPOKESMAN IN THE BATTLE AGAINST CANCER, HONORING HIS FAMILY IN THE PROCESS.
Funny how things work out. Back at the start of his career, when he was a handsome young dramatic heartthrob associated with the Hollywood “Brat Pack” of the 1980s, Rob Lowe rarely was taken seriously. But now that he is appearing in comic roles that distort his swoon-worthy looks and spoof his Casanova image, Lowe — who will be in Memphis on Friday — is collecting some of the most appreciative attention of his career.
As Liberace’s face-tightened plastic surgeon in Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candelabra,” Lowe earned a Golden Globe nomination, even though he acted in makeup that The New York Times called “a hideous simian mask.”
In “Sex Tape” (the title itself conjures memories of Lowe’s most infamous reallife incident), the actor stole the show from co-stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a weirdo media mogul with an addiction to cocaine and Disney.
Most extreme of all, a current popular series of DirectTV ads casts Lowe in a series of Jekyll/ Hyde encounters with such elaborately unattractive alter ego as “Crazy Hairy Rob Lowe” (so apelike he has “curtains” of arm hair), “Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe” (a prissy nerd) and “Super Creepy Rob Lowe” (gold chains and a biker mustache).
“Those commercials have been so successful we’re
shooting four more of them this week,” said the Charlottesville, Virginiaborn Lowe, who has been a professional actor for 35 of his 50 years.
This week, Lowe will use his celebrity pitchman status to promote a cause even more important and personal than cable versus satellite television: the battle against cancer.
Following in the footsteps of Julie Andrews, Kathy Bates, Michael Douglas, Tom Brokaw and Diane Keaton, among others, Lowe is the speaker at this year’s annual Methodist Healthcare Foundation Cancer Center Luncheon, an event that raises about $120,000 annually for the West Cancer Center, a research and treatment facility formed in 2012 in a partnership of the Methodist Healthcare Foundation, the West Clinic and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
Lowe’s cancer connection comes from his family. His mother, grandmother and great- grandmother all battled breast cancer, and his father — Chuck Lowe, a 75-year-old lawyer in Dayton, Ohio, who is “still doing great,” Rob Lowe said — is a 25-year survivor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Because my family’s had such a history, I travel the country and speak on behalf of cancer patient advocacy groups,” Lowe said. “It’s been a passion for me since 2000, when I was the first male spokesman for Breast Cancer Awareness Day.”
He said his mother, Barbara, 64, died of breast cancer in 2004, after he had become a spokesman for cancer awareness — a tragedy that cemented his commitment and underlined the necessity for cancer research.
“I’ve written two books now about my life and my point of view on things, and looking back I kind of think these talks I’ve been giving around the country were the genesis of the books,” he said. (The books are “Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography” and “Love Life.”) “One of the things I’ve learned is that people enjoy the personal connections we all share that have nothing to do with our jobs or how well known we are, but that have to do with family and growing up and the things that bind us together.”
As a novice actor, Lowe appeared in several TV productions and even earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role as a boy in need of a heart transplant in the 1983 CBS-TV movie “Thursday’s Child.” He received more notice, however, for his portrayal of “Sodapop Curtis” in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders” (1983); the film’s ensemble included Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise.
That film’s success led to a series of quintessential 1980s youth pictures, including “Class” (Lowe is the suave tutor to prep-school virgin Andrew McCarthy), “Youngblood” (Lowe is a hotheaded hockey player) and the all-star “Brat Pack” round up, “St. Elmo’s Fire.” (“A group of friends, just out of college, struggle with adulthood,” synopsizes the Internet Movie Database. “Their main problem is that they’re all self-centered and obnoxious.”)
None of those movies were Oscar winners, but “I had a lot of amazing experiences and learned a ton,” said Lowe, who found himself an increasingly recognizable celebrity as his late teens morphed into his early and mid-20s.
“I think any 19-year-old who survives life is a miracle, no matter what business they’re in, and if you throw them into worldwide fame at 19 — listen, my kids are 19 and older, and I look at them and say, ‘What would happen if they were famous worldwide?’ I wouldn’t want that for all the tea in China.”
Lowe stayed busy, appearing in the “Austin Powers” movies, becoming a regular in such hit series as “The West Wing” and “Parks and Recreation,” and fulfilling an ambition “to be able to play true characters who are totally outside of who you are,” citing the chameleonic Tracey Ullman as an inspiration. “I would have loved to have been a cast member on ‘Saturday Night Live’ so I would have had that opportunity every week.”
He said he has no career regrets, and figures even the occasional scandal of earlier years had value as a learning experience. “It’s hard to look back in 2014 and feel anything other than gratitude, that I can still have as much fun and be as relevant as I am when I’ve been doing this since 1979. Longevity in this business is the highest achievement, so whatever I did right or did wrong — and I did plenty of both — it got me to this place.”